"Two weeks before we meet, Margaret Atwood purchased her burial plot. 'You may think that’s a kind of dour thing to be doing'..."

"... she says beadily. I assure her I don’t, and perhaps detect mild disappointment in her gaze. 'Well, if you were 19 you probably would find it quite creepy.'"

Writes Decca Aitkenhead, in "Margaret Atwood: ‘God made the middle finger for a reason’/The Handmaid’s Tale author at 86 on gender wars, trade wars, assisted dying and the power of not playing nice" (London Times).

I've heard of "beady" eyes, which I've always assumed were eyes that looked like beads, but what does it mean to speak "beadily"?

"She says she has never scared people 'on purpose,' but the pleasure she takes in her own power is apparent and exhilarating to observe. When I ask whether I should call her Margaret or the name she grew up with, Peggy, she inquires, 'Well, who are you speaking to right at the moment?' Er, to you. 'Yes, but who is me?' Amusement teases in her eyes. 'You’re not talking to the writer, because I’m not writing at the moment. So Peggy.' When I later mention some people who used to behave very badly towards me, her eyes narrow. 'Are any of them dead?' Not yet. 'Oh well, it could be arranged.'"

"An 1888 ordinance from the British colonial government precipitated the need for coffins. The traditional Ga practice..."

"... had been to bury relatives beneath the floor of the family home, to keep the dead close by. But British officials, concerned about hygiene, mandated the use of wooden coffins for burial in designated cemeteries. Some have suggested that fantasy coffins allowed Ghanaians to celebrate their lives and achievements while complying with the law...."

From "6 Feet Under in Art Coffins That Are Over the Top/Elaborate coffins, produced by Ghanaian artisans, are the centerpieces of funerals that celebrate the life of the deceased and get them to the afterlife in style" (NYT gift link)(lots of photos of fantasy coffins).

"For Ga families, finding a fitting design, whether a book for a teacher or a truck with a squeeze-bulb horn for a mechanic, can be a complex and emotional process.... In 2020, a coffin in the shape of a circumcised penis, which was publicized on social media, was rumored to have been made for a sex worker and was widely seen as disrespectful. In fact, it was made to honor a traditional wanzam, similar to a Jewish mohel — someone who performs male circumcisions...."

"You can get married at the New York Marble Cemetery on Second Avenue/The Balloon Saloon in Tribeca has the best gag gifts and the biggest fake poops in town."

"Avoid trampoline parks at all costs. Throw a less chaotic kids’ party instead at Twinkle PlaySpace in Williamsburg. For $399, hire NY Teacup Piggies to bring in three piglets for the young partygoers to play with.... Call Beverly Fish at Chezzam for out-of-the-box entertainment — think actors in rat costumes serving a cheese platter.... You can hire a babysitter to walk your child (ages 4 to 15) from school to your home (or wherever they need to go) using the service Trot My Tot. You’ll pay a maximum of $25 per hour.... Cheeky tweens tend to enjoy the 'butt scavenger hunt' at the Brooklyn Museum; ask for it at admissions.... "

From "259 Things New Yorkers Should Know/The second edition of our annual handbook will help you make the most of the city" (NY Magazine).

I looked up the "butt scavenger hunt" so you don't have to:

"Standing in an outdoor car park on which he wants to build flats, Carvelli watched as archaeologists got busy unearthing ancient Roman skeletons..."

"... mosaics and tombs. 'We had problems like this before in Rome when we had to work around a tomb but this is on a different level,' Carvelli said. When builders broke ground at the car park last year, archaeologists checked for ancient ruins and stumbled on a large Roman burial ground, complete with 20 tombs and 50 skeletons piled in pits for the poor, a mere six feet below where Romans have been parking their cars for years.... Peering into one hole in the ground full of skeletons, Walter Pantano, an anthropologist, surveyed the tangle of arms, rib cages and grinning skulls with their teeth intact...."

From "Ancient remains of necropolis stand in way of Rome’s builders/The abundance of artefacts and even skeletons underfoot is proving a frustrating barrier to development in the Eternal City" (London Times).

"The once ubiquitous bird has suffered a catastrophic decline.... As many as 98 per cent disappeared from some states."

"Rats and feral dogs flourished in their place, spreading diseases, including rabies. As a result, the human death toll rose significantly. And further to that, Schama adds, an ancient cultural ritual risks being lost. Zoroastrians, no longer able to perform their traditional 'sky burials' — in which corpses are carried to a 'tower of silence' to be picked clean by vultures — are forced to consider cremation instead. 

This chain of collapse between human culture and the lives of birds set me thinking,' Schama says...."

From  "Simon Schama: 'Our fascination with birds is rooted in envy'/The historian has curated an exhibition that explores the relationship between birds and humans" (London Times).

"'What are they, these creatures, two-limbed like us and yet nothing like us at all?' he wonders. 'Human culture is arranged around the perfection of the human,' he says. 'We are seen as God’s greatest works. But one thing we have not been able to do is fly.' Our fascination with birds, he suggests, 'is based around a sort of envy.' Because what we call flying is not really that, it’s just 'sitting in a metal tube with the blinds shut looking at old movies.' It is not about the glorious freedom that we dream of, about the transcendence we desire, the celestial state that we yearn for. That freedom of spirit will always elude us.'"

About that talus cone and the fossilized tooth plaque....

I'm reading "10,000 Tales From a 17th-Century Crypt/In Milan, bones that piled under a hospital over a half-century shed light on the health and habits of some of the Renaissance era’s most impoverished people" (NYT).

The burial vaults formed a sort of subterranean potter’s field. After a heavy granite lid was removed from one of the square holes in the church floor, bodies would be dropped into a vault of the brick-lined tombs. Over time, the corpses accumulated and formed a funnel-shaped pile, called a talus cone. These pyramids of remains grew over time, widening at the base and tapering to a point at the top. When a talus cone reached the ceiling and could not hold more bodies, a new underground vault would be used....

"Unfazed by rats..."

My son Chris reads books about Presidents and sends me the occasional snapshot. That's the latest.

AND: Who was Clover Adams? Wikipedia:

Clover, who has been cited as the inspiration for writer Henry James's Daisy Miller (1878) and The Portrait of a Lady (1881), was married to writer Henry Adams. After her suicide, he commissioned the famous Adams Memorial, which features an enigmatic androgynous bronze sculpture by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, to stand at the site of her, and his, grave.

Not snobbish enough to refrain from suicide — or can suicide be snobbish?! In any case, what a grave —

"They... filled the cracks in my dodgy vertebra with this human cement stuff. I mean, I’ve got so many plates and bolts inside me already..."

"... why not pour a slab of concrete in there too?... Death’s been knocking at my door for the last six years, louder and louder. And at some point I’m gonna have to let him in. The funny thing is, I used to worry more about my mortality when I was younger. It’s weird. You get closer to the end — the very thing you were scared of your whole life — and suddenly the weight’s lifted off you.... When the end does come, I don’t want to be cremated. It’s like you were never here. You’re just a bag of dust. That’s not for me. I wanna make the flowers grow.... It’s just crazy how quickly a lifetime goes.... Life’s so short...."

Writes Ozzy Osbourne, in "Ozzy Osbourne: How Sharon and I pulled off my crazy last gig/Less than three weeks before he died, the ailing Black Sabbath frontman played one final concert, for 42,000 fans at Villa Park. In an extract from his posthumous memoir, he shares the inside story of the biggest miracle of his unlikely career" (London Times).

"Buying a cemetery plot where I can have a green burial, on the other hand, proved to be surprisingly affordable and will allow my body, once no longer in use..."

"... to decompose as quickly and as naturally as possible, with minimal environmental damage. Bonus: If my descendants ever care to visit, my grave will be in a beloved place, where my daughter has come nearly every summer of her life. 'Do you see a lot of interest in green burials?' I asked the friendly town cemetery commissioner who was showing me around. 'I don’t think we’ve had a traditional burial in two years,' he said. 'It’s all green.'"

From "When I Go, I’m Going Green More Americans are choosing burials in which everything is biodegradable" (NYT).

"She is desperate for the book to not be a downer, to be a jolt instead. 'The pity fucking kills me,' she said. 'It kills my strength.'"

"She wanted the perception to be 'the opposite: She’s alive. She’s enjoying her life. This is great.' She went on: 'The book is highly comedic. And then it slides down into horrible tragedy and then comes back up to the punch line.' I’d finished the whole thing, but I had to ask what the punch line was. There were a handful, she said. But the most important one was that you’re never too old to get even."

From "E. Jean Carroll’s Uneasy Peace/In the year and a half since defeating Trump for the second time, she’s written a secret book — and learned to shoot" (NY Magazine).

At the end of this long article, there's some discussion of the security around her home. Asked if she worried about the danger of turning off her security lights so that the frogs that once mated in her swimming pool would sing again, as they had in the past:

"Can you do me a favor? Can you stop scattering your dearly departed’s ashes all over my favorite golf course?"

"I want to play Pebble Beach, not your grandpa. For that matter, stop dumping your meemaw’s sandy 'cremains' on Disneyland rides. Last year, somebody on Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance pulled the stunt, forcing the ride’s shutdown for cleaning. What are parents in the next car supposed to tell the kids when a cloud of human ash hits them in the face? Luke, that is not your father...."

From "Please. Stop. Spreading. Human. Ash. In. Public. With a huge rise in cremation rates, a sentimental ritual is turning into a gritty scourge" (WaPo)(free-access link, because it's full of amusing/horrible details).

Can we also stop saying "cremains"? I see the author put the term in scare quotes and the word "ash" is in the headline. I object to "cremains." The word, according to the OED, only dates back to 1950, and it seems to have been concocted like the name of a snack food. For example, Funyuns = fun + onions. Wouldn't it be more respectful to say "ashes"? Or do we think that "ashes" suggests the soft silky material left after a wood fire and thus has a whiff of false advertising?

Arlington Cemetery — "It is not a place for politics.... And I will never politicize them."

I've avoided discussing the topic, because I can see that to talk about it is to violate the principle that the military dead should not be politicized. And yet to follow that principle is to cramp political debate about war, and political debate about war should be central to every presidential campaign. And the assertion that this is no place for politics is itself political debate.

But the main reason I'm going to start talking about this issue is because the Kamala Harris X account put up this long tweet yesterday. I've boldfaced the quotes I used for the post title:

As Vice President, I have had the privilege of visiting Arlington National Cemetery several times. It is a solemn place; a place where we come together to honor American heroes who have made the ultimate sacrifice in service of this nation. It is not a place for politics. And yet, as was reported this week, Donald Trump’s team chose to film a video there, resulting in an altercation with cemetery staff. Let me be clear: the former president disrespected sacred ground, all for the sake of a political stunt. This is nothing new from Donald Trump. This is a man who has called our fallen service members “suckers” and “losers” and disparaged Medal of Honor recipients. A man who, during a previous visit to the cemetery, reportedly said of fallen service members, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” This is a man who is unable to comprehend anything other than service to himself. If there is one thing on which we as Americans can all agree, it is that our veterans, military families, and service members should be honored, never disparaged, and treated with nothing less than our highest respect and gratitude. And it is my belief that someone who cannot meet this simple, sacred duty should never again stand behind the seal of the President of the United States of America. I will always honor the service and sacrifice of all of America’s fallen heroes, who made the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of our beloved nation and our cherished freedoms. I mourn them and salute them. And I will never politicize them.

Those cannot be words straight from the mind of Kamala Harris. They sound like words written for Joe Biden to read off a teleprompter, replete with his oft-repeated claim that Trump said  “suckers” and “losers” and “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” It's entirely political, including, of course, the assertion that it is not political.

Trump's visit to the cemetery was also political. It was a first move in a political game that Harris ought to have chosen not to play. But she couldn't get all her supporters to refrain from playing, and in the end, she jumped in. She made the obvious move, and it is an awful blunder. You knew it was a blunder — didn't you? (I hope you are at least that savvy) — but you just had to do it. 

If only you'd had the sense and the restraint to delete most of the words. Let me help retrospectively and uselessly:

George Orwell said, "There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them."

I'm thinking about that today, watching this:

MSNBC host: JD Vance wishing to join his family plot (6 generations) in Kentucky is WHITE MALE SUPREMACY pic.twitter.com/zYfYtdSqmt

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) July 18, 2024

You have to go to college to think that up.

Memorial Day at Forest Hill Cemetery in Madison, Wisconsin.

Photos by Meade.

ADDED: Meade's video of the crowd listening to the Military Service Medley by the VFW 1318 Band:

In the land of LBJ.

We drove out into the hill country to see the birthplace of President Lyndon Johnson:

 

"which piece of public art in Madison disturbs you most?"

A topic of discussion at r/madisonwi.

There are so many to choose from, but the biggest rivalry is between "Flayed Bucky by the Best Western on Highland by UW Hospital" and "The sculpture of the parents reaching out to their dead child in the cemetery on Speedway Road."

About that dead child sculpture, someone says:

I actually like that sculpture, although I'm probably not in the majority. If you ask me "how can I feel more alive?" I'd parrot Martin Heidegger, "spend more time in graveyards."

EDIT: Now that I know it's a "memorial" against abortion I don't like it anymore.

There's also "The turd on top of a pyramid on Regent Street" and the "crowning woman" and "The pale yellow man resting on the bike bridge at Jenifer Street." And "The plaques along Picnic Point that showcase monetary donations and ego over nature and historically sacred land." 

Way too many people bring up the "footballs penis" and need to be told that was excised.

It's pretty hilarious that there was such a wealth of bad public art around here to choose from. 

"He doesn’t dispute the fact that people are buried on his land or that the area is steeped in Revolutionary significance..."

"... his vision for the IHOP involves a wait staff in tricorne hats and bonnets. But it was still a bit of a mystery exactly whose bones were buried on his property and who put them there. And, besides, if there really were hundreds of soldiers beneath the ground, Broccoli believed it to be self-evident that he was the one pursuing the vision of life, liberty, and happiness that George Washington’s troops had fought and died for: the right to sell pancakes where they were buried...."

From "The Battle of Fishkill/When Domenic Broccoli set out to expand his IHOP empire upstate, he didn’t expect to find a grave site — or start a war" (NY Magazine).

There's a misplaced modifier — "where they were buried" — but still, I like that passage. I love that a restaurant guy is named Broccoli, but he sells pancakes. And I love that it's IHOP — which is the first place that ever employed me and also iconic in the writings of David Sedaris. And Broccoli's opponents are colorful and sometimes dressed in Revolutionary War outfits.

Headstone cleaner?!

We're repainting the rooms in the 100-year-old part of our house, and — instead of, once again, painting around the brass hardware on the windows and in the closets — for the first time, these various pieces got removed. Every time the trim had been repainted, the painter had slopped some paint onto the metal, and each painter, it seems, felt as though they were only following the paint-slopping tradition. On the window handles, I myself had recently chosen to close up the gaps and paint the entire surface.

But all those hooks in the coat closet looked like a lot of trouble to paint around, and we got the idea to unscrew everything. Was this going to involve paint stripper? No! I looked it up on the internet, and it turns out what you need is a crockpot. So we did unscrew all the window and closet hardware — 30 items, plus over 100 screws — and cook them overnight in water and Dawn detergent. 

"Human composting — or, as it’s sometimes referred to, natural organic reduction — fulfills many people’s desire to nurture the earth after dying."

"It owes much of its present form to Katrina Spade, a Washington-based designer and entrepreneur who told me that her goal is to see 'composting overtake cremation as the default American deathcare in the next couple of decades.' In 2015, as an architecture student, Ms. Spade launched a nonprofit called the Urban Death Project, envisioning strolling past the brownstones of Brooklyn and coming upon a municipal human composting facility. Here, passersby would reflect on mortality and the cycle of life, feeling a sense of connection to the earth, past and future — the way urban cemeteries like Green-Wood were designed to make repose in death a harmonious part of city life..."

From "If You Want to Give Something Back to Nature, Give Your Body" by Caitlin Doughty (NYT).

But we're told the New York State Catholic Conference has said this process “is more appropriate for vegetable trimmings and eggshells than for human bodies.”  

"I wish I could say that the French Alps healed me. That I basked in their beauty and found the spiritual rest and direction I was seeking."

"But Grenoble frightened me. I heard stories of midday muggings where victims were pepper sprayed. Once, I saw two cars in a parking lot engulfed in flames. Another time, a rock shattered the bus window next to my face while I rode home from work, scattering glass fragments across the seat."

Writes Susanne Parker Loelius, in "To Find Love, Rub the (Bronze) Bulge/Groping a statue seemed a little odd, but entire tour groups were doing it, so I did too. And voilà!" (NYT).